Buddy

Inspiration

As undergraduate students, we have all experienced burnout and stress during the school year. Last term, due to the stay-at-home order and resulting lack of interaction with peers, the experience of stress and loneliness has arguably doubled.

Unfortunately, it is not always easy to find someone to vent to all the time.

What it does

Buddy allows you a safe outlet to express your problems privately, have a study partner, and practice meditation and mindfulness together.

How we built it

We coded the frontend using Reactjs and React-sound libraries. When you click on the pet, the music will be played in the background and the timer starts counting down based on the time you choose to meditate. We used python for defining the functions and used flask to host the local server. Project.py includes the functions that we detect in the human voice and split them into words from sentences. Each word will be compared to the list of the words that we have. Other functions will recall one of the audio files that we have based on the user’s pet preference and what they want either study or meditation. App.py file creates the local host file with flask. It helps the frontend to execute the python code.

Challenges we ran into

We were all newbies so we had a hard time trying to wrap our head around React and Flask. For React we worked with audio files so we had to figure out how to render the file and how many times we want to play it etc.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Under the time constraint, we did not expect ourselves to be able to finish everything in time. We’re proud to have each person push themselves beyond the limit! The designer spent the entire weekend on the design part. The PM is from a non-CS background but she is passionate about health and mental well-being. The coders are all rookies in web app and we all learned React/Flask during the weekend!

What we learned

We learned about software development and how to work with different time zones and had a lot of fun! We are from 3 different time zones!

What's next for Buddy

We should have more keywords so that we can talk to people using different kinds of words. This backend has limitations if one sentence includes at least one word from each list. This case, the code will have a bug. Therefore, our next step is understanding a situation where a user uses words from each list and defines what they want more.